Sometimes Bukowski is
just too sad for me,
harping on death,
thinking about death
all the time, sitting and drinking
and angry growling
at the page,

Kerouac, too, with his death
and compassion and poor Gerard’s
death so young and frail, and Joyce talking
of death writing about death death
death Dublin and death and sadness,

sometimes I’m too sad for myself,
blank pages make me sad
and pages filled with text, thoughts,
any sad thing just stacked
like boxes in old gray warehouses
where people die and go to
die and waste their sad lives dying,

sometimes sadness and death
is all there is to write about,

every story ends with death
even the ones unwritten.